A new play by Sofya Levitsky-Weitz.

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At 17, Meril and Jean are best friends who can finish each other’s sentences. At 27 they are struggling to reconnect and make sense of their shared past. Moving fluidly across a decade of change, growth, divergent choices, immense love and deep hurt, playwright Sofya Levitsky-Weitz (a 2015 alum of Northwestern’s MFA in Writing for the Stage & Screen) paints a portrait of the power of friendship, and the damage we can inflict on ourselves in the name of love, desire, and ambition.

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To me, Be Mean to Me is a play about female trauma and what it means to grow up a woman and to live with unresolved trauma. It is a play about dirt and blood and loss but it is also a play about joy. When I first read the play I instantly imagined a small childish joy of its leads Meril and Jean rolling down a grassy hill. As Meril tells Jean in the play "you exist here". Jean's childhood backyard is where her deepest trauma manifests so scenically I wanted a world that felt like nothing that existed past the end of the yard. I wanted it to feel like the edge of the world. At the crumbling edges of that world are the detritus of Jean's life. In archeology, one of the principles of stratigraphy is the deeper you go the older the material. Stratigraphy is a beautiful metaphor for trauma.